Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Digital Number Crunching

Bumped into this unlisted video on Youtube made last summer to explain the international audiences to the BBC World Service and BBC World News. It is number crunching on steroids.
But what it is really saying? The BBC is influencing 1/4 billion people once a week or more? Sounds a bit too much like the Facebook claims. And remember the context is becoming far more important than just the content.

In short, these kinds of numbers help to impress politicians. But they say very little about the quality of the conversation. That's partly because the quality of the BBC's competition, in most of the target areas has gone from bad to worse. Rolling TV news channels killed investigative journalism. So now the best news you can use is not appearing on broadcast news channels.